All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Next up is Gareth Porter.
Thank goodness.
Hey, Gareth, how are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
Good to be here again.
Well, I'm happy to have you here.
I appreciate you doing it.
Antiwar.com/Porter.
You can find all of Gareth's stuff that he writes for.
Interpress Service.
That's IPSnews.net.
The great Jim Loeb et al.
And et al, in that case, translates directly into a bunch of really great writers and reporters out there at IPSnews.net.
And so I've been gone for a little while, and I got back, and I need catching up.
And I was hoping you could explain what's going on with the false flag, Jandala, this and that.
I'm very curious about the report by Mark Perry about how it wasn't the CIA backing Jandala.
It was the Mossad pretending to back Jandala.
I'm not so sure if I'd buy that.
I want to know what you think about that.
And then, of course, there's under the category of provocations and details about America and Israel's quite dangerous set of circumstances surrounding our relationship with Iran, there are any number of stories that I guess I would defer to you to just emphasize whichever ones you think are the most important from the last little while that I've missed.
Well, let's start with the Jandala-CIA-Mossad story, because it is a very significant revelation for a couple of reasons.
The main one, I think, being that, as you know well and many of your listeners will also know, the general understanding in the past has been that in fact the CIA was tied up with Jandala, this Sunni extremist pro-al-Qaeda, supposedly, group of terrorists who operated out of Baluchistan in Pakistan and then went into Iran and operated there carrying out terrorist attacks against both military and civilian targets.
And, of course, this supposed CIA connection with Jandala was bound to be a major provocation to Iran.
And, in fact, Iran clearly did believe that the CIA was involved with Jandala, and there's no doubt that that constituted one of the major factors in their view of what not just the Bush administration but the Obama administration as well were really up to with regard to Iran.
Well, and the reporting at the time was by greats like Andrew Coburn and Seymour Hersh who were reporting new findings passed by the Bush and Obama governments and reported to the Senate Intelligence and I guess House Intelligence Committees that this is what we're up to and I guess they had even appropriated the money in Andrew Coburn's writing.
And just as recently as a couple of weeks ago, and, of course, Phil will be on the show tomorrow so it's out of order for this interview, but just a couple of weeks ago Phil Giraldi had an article saying there are two new findings, one on Iran and one on Syria, and they basically step up exactly this thing, support for M.E.K., Jandala, PJAK, communist Kurd factions in Iraq and that border region there, and now including some Naziri groups, supposedly.
Yeah.
Okay, so now, sorry, go ahead.
So that's the setting.
I mean, it looked very much like the United States was indeed involved in some activities that were bound to cause the Iranians to believe that not only was the U.S. supporting regime change in general, but it was supporting terrorism in Iran.
Now, what we understand at this point changes the picture quite a bit because of what Mark Perry, who's a very veteran and careful, painstakingly cautious reporter, has been able to put together is a number of former CIA officials, retired CIA officials, who give the same account that they discovered that Mossad had been impersonating their personnel working with Jandala, had been impersonating CIA agents.
In other words, they were giving the Jandala people they were working with reason to believe that they were CIA agents.
They had U.S. passports.
They were obviously American-looking, American-talking.
Perhaps they were American citizens or dual citizens.
Probably they were using people who could pass for Americans perfectly.
And they had the Jandala people convinced that the CIA was supporting them.
And so, obviously, Jandala tells everybody that they have contact with in Pakistan and elsewhere.
And even when they get captured, they tell the Iranians that, yeah, they were working with the Americans, with the CIA.
Now, you know...
Either that or it's a bunch of nonsense.
I don't know, man.
Well, I mean...
I mean, here's my thing.
I guess I would...
I'm assuming, not my conclusion, but some kind of basis here, that they're working together on this, the Americans and the Israelis.
The Israelis aren't stabbing the Americans in the back on this.
Why would they?
What's that appropriations money and all these findings and orders to the CIA for, anyway?
We know Jay Sotkin and CIA are in that country, anyway, from all different other reporting.
Right?
Well, I have no doubt that Jay Sotkin...
And you look at the WikiLeaks from 2007, where Mayor Dagan, the head of Mossad, and Nicholas Burns are talking about, we might disagree on when to start dropping bombs, but we agree about backing these groups.
Well, you know, let me start with that WikiLeaks document.
I'm glad you brought it up, because I've read that a couple of times, and what I get from that document is, of course, Dagan says that they agree to go off the record in discussing the subject of covert operations in regard to Iran.
But what Dagan is doing there is selling Nicholas Burns on Israel's program for regime change and other destabilization activities in Iran.
This is a unilateral effort by Israel to get the United States on board.
And, you know, if you really go more deeply into Israel's policy here, you know that the guy who this...
Israeli former ambassador in Iran during the Shah's time, whose name I've forgotten at the moment, has been trying to get Americans to line up with Israel to support the Israeli idea for regime change, which involves all kinds of things, including support for people like Jund al-Ain, MEK, and so forth, but not limited to that.
And, you know, there are multiple sources that indicate that he did not succeed in getting the U.S. government to sign on to that.
You know, the Israelis were quite frustrated by the fact they couldn't get the United States to support their policy.
So, I mean, I think that WikiLeaks document does not really support the case that Mark Perry's story is BS.
On the contrary, I think it meshes with it because the Israelis are clearly the ones who are in the driver's seat in terms of this whole set of policies.
I mean, if you go around, including MEK and PJAK, I mean, there is plenty of evidence that the Israelis have had operational ties with the MEK as well as PJAK for many years.
And, of course, I mean, there have been reports that the CIA is tied up with both outfits, has worked with both outfits in terms of supporting their terrorism.
But, in fact, I think that this story about the relationship between Mossad and Jund al-Ain sheds some new light here.
I would doubt, for a variety of reasons, as I have looked over the information available on these different cases, it now seems much more doubtful that, in fact, it was the CIA that was doing it.
I think it was the Israelis who were doing it and they were trying to convince everybody that it was the CIA.
Now, you always sound kind of crazy if you ever ascribe competence to any government policy.
But could it be that the purpose of assassinating all these scientists over there and using groups like Jund al-Ain to do it is in order to get that blowback?
That just like Osama bin Laden, Israeli terrorism works on the principle that the action is in the reaction.
It's to make it so that they can't negotiate.
No one who wants to negotiate can get a voice inside the Iranian government.
That is precisely my argument, and we'll come back to that in a moment.
Okay, great.
Hold it right there.
It's Gareth Porter, interpressserviceipsnews.net, antiwar.com/porter, really, original.antiwar.com/porter.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott.
And I'm talking with Gareth Porter, historian and journalist for interpressserviceipsnews.net and original.antiwar.com/porter.
And we're talking about this story that broke at Foreign Policy that the Israelis went to England and posed as CIA agents and recruited Beluki separatist Sunni jihadist terrorists to commit terrorist acts.
And I guess, I don't know if there are specific ties to the assassinations of the scientists over there or what.
Well, we're getting to that.
That's the next step, I think, in this conversation.
Go right ahead.
That's where we're going.
But quickly, just very quickly, we just talked very briefly about the MEK and about PJAK.
In both cases, let me just remind you that despite the fact that Feith and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld were very, very eager to get the Bush administration to use the MEK for precisely the kinds of things that we're talking about here to carry out operations inside Iran, not intelligence gathering, but actual sabotage and terrorist operations.
Not only is there no evidence that the Bush administration went ahead with it, there is a lot of evidence that the Bush administration said no and never changed that policy.
The neocons never succeeded in getting the kind of use of the MEK that they were aiming at during the Bush administration.
On PJAK, the people that I've spoken with in the last few days suggest that the evidence for CIA involvement with PJAK is very, very weak, and there's good reason to believe that this would be something that the United States would not do for a variety of reasons because of its relationship with Turkey particularly.
On the other hand, the Israelis have every reason to be pursuing a strong working relationship with PJAK, and it appears there's a lot of evidence that the Israelis have been working directly with even training PJAK terrorists.
So I think there's a pattern here, and that leads us to then the campaign of assassination or murder, if you will, of Iranian scientists connected with the nuclear program.
And what seems clearer now with the advantage of hindsight, as you look back over the last couple of years, you see that what Israel has done is not a wholesale effort to pick off as many...
Well, let's put this...
They have not, either not been able to or not intended to, pick off large numbers of Iranian scientists connected with the nuclear program.
What they've done is to pick off people who were easy targets and who they could kill in broad daylight, and they have...
I think what they've been doing is, again, by way of a provocation.
This is not something that substantively changes the progress by the Iranian government in terms of its nuclear program.
What it does is simply to plant the seeds of greater hostility and suspicion towards the United States.
And we don't know this for a fact, but I would not at all be surprised if the Israelis weren't doing the same thing in their recruitment of people to carry out the assassinations or killings of these Iranian scientists that they did with Jandala.
That is to say, they led them to believe that they were Americans.
Well, now, ABC News is reporting that Iranian students are switching majors to nuclear sciences.
A little bit of blowback for you there, which gets us back to always the prime question here, like, what is the point of this?
If the Israelis don't want negotiations, they want to provoke this kind of reaction, where the Iranians can only harden their position on their nuclear program, then that, I guess, obviously is supposed to just leave America with no choice but to go ahead and have a full-scale war or regime change there.
Well, I think it's not...
But the people who run the American military and really even all the eggheads on the East Coast, everybody knows we can't really do that.
And we also know that Jandala and MEK can't do it for us or for Israel or for anybody else.
So what the hell do they even think they're doing here?
Garrett, that's my question, because I still don't know after all this time.
It's not just blowback in terms of reinforcing the determination of Iranians to have a full fuel cycle nuclear program.
It's also that, you know, it seems clear to me that the Israelis are hoping that the Iranians will do something to retaliate, which will then trigger a process of escalation.
What they really want, of course, is to be able to have a war that they can say the Iranians started and the Americans will have difficulty staying out of.
And that is, I think, really the ultimate prize for the Israelis.
That is to say, this whole campaign against nuclear scientists is part of a broader effort.
But then what do they think they're going to get?
Like a 1999 Kosovo war from the air, where, you know, well, we'll just bomb them for a few months and then we'll stop and call it a victory or something?
Well, I mean, they might hope that the Iranians would retaliate by doing something in the Strait of Hormuz to try to stop traffic and that maybe they would change a few minds.
Maybe they would take some time.
You see how naive I am?
Basically, Gareth, you're telling me that, yes, the Israelis are willing to kind of try to force America into a full-scale invasion-type level war against Iran.
Is that right?
And I just can't imagine that they're that brazen.
This takes us back to Rule Mark Direct and his now infamous writing of 2010, if I remember correctly, in commentary in commentary in which he or, I'm sorry, maybe it was the Weekly Standard, in which he basically made it quite clear that the what he hopes for is that the United States will the United States and Israel will pursue policies that the Iranians will respond to by doing something that will trigger a military conflict and that will allow then the United States to really hammer into the United States to really hammer not just the nuclear facilities that's not the primary problem for Israel and its neoconservative allies in the United States what they really want is to reduce Iran's overall power potential and that means hitting economic targets it means hitting all of the military targets that are available in Iran and that's what Rule Mark Direct was calling for.
And I think that's to me that was a major clue to the thinking of Netanyahu and Ehud Barak in Israel.
Now does this represent pushback by the American establishment a little bit here when the Washington Post headline reads Israeli Army says a nuclear Iran could deter Israeli military action against Hamas Hezbollah which is you know what Ehud Barak the defense minister and Benjamin Netanyahu the prime minister admitted to Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic back in the summer of 2009 or 10 I forget which where they said no we're not really afraid that they would nuke us if they had nukes we're just afraid that it may get harder for us to aggress against people in southern Lebanon This is not just Netanyahu and Barak it's the general understanding of the defense and intelligence establishment But it's also a headline in the Washington Post and that's news itself right?
Well I mean if the Washington Post it is not something that's new I'm saying it's news that they say it's news Well I mean Not because they say it's news but that they say it's news it seems like the kind they ignore It happened because you know a prominent Israeli defense specialist a general in the IDF gave a briefing in which he said that so I mean it's not just the Post deciding hey but it is them not well in fact here see I got my whole riff wrong it's the AP at the Post website anyway I don't know what they're talking about It's really it's really a reflection of what's happening within the IDF the Israeli defense forces that they are pretty realistic about the implications of the Iranians having a nuclear capability or even having an actual nuclear weapon make it harder for the Israelis to carry out a war in Lebanon or against Hamas I mean even that I think is something of an exaggeration because the fact is the Israelis are already deterred by the tens of thousands of rockets that the Hezbollah has prepared to retaliate against an attack either against Lebanon or against Hamas with the capability of retaliating so they are already in a situation where there is a balance of power I think there is a certain degree of dissimulation involved in this argument that it would change anything when the Iranians were to get a bomb I think they were more cautious than the rest of the world in the 1960s when Khrushchev said to Harriman look when the Chinese get a bomb they will become more cautious not less cautious obviously alright
